Going Deep: Catholic high schools have more challenges when it comes to fostering a relationship with youth teams

Look down the lineup of teams from the two local youth football associations, and familiar names start popping up.

View full sizeTrinity coach Bill Ragni has to work with multiple youth programs and hope those players decide to attend private school. JOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News

Cumberland Valley, Mechanicsburg, Middletown, Carlisle. It’s pretty clear where those young football players will be going to high school, and most of those high school coaches have already built a strong connection with their feeder programs.

On the other side of that are the area’s two Catholic high schools, Trinity and Bishop McDevitt. They have no set boundaries for where their students come from, but that also means they don’t have a dedicated feeder program that will send the majority of their players to their schools.

The Catholic Football Association, or CFA, developed out of the CYO Football League in 1973 with nine local parishes. As the years went on, some teams combined with others and public teams began joining.

Today, of the 17 associations in the CFA, there are four teams from Catholic parishes, with Holy Name and Seven Sorrows on the East Shore and St. Joseph and Good Shepherd on the West Shore, and while coaches work to keep a relationship with these programs there’s a big difference from the public schools.

“The one difference is that it’s no given that the kids are going to come to here,” Trinity coach Bill Ragni said. “They can go to St. Joes they can go to Good Shepherd, and there’s still no guarantee that they’ll go to a private school.

“The relationship is still healthy, but not as certain as with the public schools.”

That doesn’t keep him from trying to develop that relationship further. St. Joseph has copies of the Trinity playbook, runs the same spread offense and even plays its games at Trinity’s COBO Field.

Good Shepherd was running its own spread offense before Ragni took over the Shamrock program and installed his own.

The East Shore is a different story, though. Seven Sorrows is a smaller program that generally only gets kids from Middletown, and Holy Name is a large organization that brings in players from all over Dauphin County and beyond.

“We’re a named after a Catholic school, but we’re not an entirely Catholic organization. You don’t have to be Catholic or go to Holy Name to play for us.”

Mosey said the team’s closest connection would be with Bishop McDevitt, thanks to the hard work of athletic director and assistant coach Tommy Mealy, who gets to Holy Name as often as he can.

The team also has connections to other programs through the simplest of ways: high school coaches sending their sons there to play, as Susquehanna Twp.’s Joe Headen and Milton Hershey’s Jeff Boger do.

Due to the multitude of relationships, Mosey says Holy Name does a little bit of everything.

“We’re not one to have a high school coach tell us what to run,” he said. “Our team’s, you’ll see a little bit of McDevitt, a little bit of Central Dauphin, a little bit of Susquehanna, and that might change year-to-year depending on our personnel.

“And I know that if I have a question about something, I can always ask any of those coaches.”

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